Phillip Wilson (00:00)

Nancy Jowske (00:01)
good to see you.

Phillip Wilson (00:02)
Yeah, it’s great to see you. Great to see you. I cannot wait for this episode. So this is a you know sort of a like a little known part of our consulting world and a lot of the work that we do together. But we’re gonna talk about the power of research in the labor relations world. So that’s our main topic for today. But before

Phillip Wilson (00:23)
we get started, just maybe introduce yourself to the audience a little bit. So tell everybody a little bit about your background. You’ve got a fascinating background and I think they would really appreciate hearing it.

Nancy Jowske (00:34)
okay. so I’ve been a consultant on the employer side for about fifteen years now, almost exclusively with LRI. And prior to that, for about 10 years I was a union organizer and an organizing director, actually for SEIU. And so that gives me insights, I think, into how things look on the other side in ways that if you haven’t been over there, you know, you don’t really understand, I guess, where the bodies are buried.

Phillip Wilson (01:01)
Mm-hmm.

Nancy Jowske (01:01)
And then I also have a degree in art, and I really enjoy, have always enjoyed expository writing. And I got tired of traveling. So all of that together, this has really been a blessing that for about the past five years, it’s all been research. Prior to that, I did campaigns, I did trainings, we developed

Phillip Wilson (01:19)
Mm-hmm.

Nancy Jowske (01:20)
some stuff together, so I’ve been around for a while.

Phillip Wilson (01:22)
Yeah, yeah. You are amazingly talented in like a bunch of different areas and but like you said, the last five years or so you’ve really focused on

Phillip Wilson (01:32)
this research component. So maybe just tell us a little bit about like what so kind of howyou mentioned, you know, not wanting to travel, but like what what was it that sort of like got you into this research area in the first place?

Nancy Jowske (01:47)
So you all came to me back in, I think it was 22012 with a client that you had just come in contact with that was opening up a bunch of sites and was interested in site reports. And at this point I wasn’t doing anything. I was out doing campaigns; I wasn’t doing anything

Phillip Wilson (02:01)
Mm-hmm.

Nancy Jowske (02:02)
like that. But I assume, well, I always felt like I was the consultant who would take on stuff where other people just wanted to go out and consult.

Phillip Wilson (02:12)
Kinda true.

Nancy Jowske (02:12)
But yeah, kind of true. And so you guys came to me with, you know, this client needs like seven, I think it was seven or twelve or something of these site reports, you know, and I’m okay, I guess I can figure out, you know, what that looks like, basically like an external risk report. And so we did that, and then we did like another big bunch of them. And then slowly over time, we started out with just that one client. 14 years later, that’s still my biggest client, which is still that original client, so they must be happy, you know, hundreds of reports later. And they seem pretty picky. But along the way, a couple of things happened. So it all evolved beyond site reports to industry reports, sort of, you know, and not just this one client; other clients came in with what’s going on in healthcare, what’s going on? So those big sort of industry reports, regional reports, you know,

Phillip Wilson (03:02)
Mm-hmm.

Nancy Jowske (03:03)
How worried should I be about Minneapolis or whatever- those kind of questions and that became sort of my bread and butter, but there are fewer and fewer of those; it’s the local. Tell me about this local because they filed

Nancy Jowske (03:15)
a petition, or they’ve shown some interest or whatever. Then there’s also been quite a bit, even more so now, well, kind of goes up and down, these alternative groups and you know, different people that show up and fly your site or whatever. And are they connected to unions and nine times out of ten they are.

And then sometimes an individual, an organizer or something who’s, you know, or maybe and then there’s also been more and more bargaining prep and I kind of wish I never said I could do this, which is contract breakdown. It’s one of the things I want to teach Claude how to do is break down a contract, because that’s pretty, I do it and I find amazing things when I do, so anyway.

Phillip Wilson (03:56)
Yeah,

Nancy Jowske (03:56)
That’s what they are.

Phillip Wilson (03:57)
I know, like, at some point we’ll talk about the UPS contract, but there’s a lot of these big contracts that get promoted, you know, in the press as giant union wins, and one of the things that you’re masterful at is really breaking down, just sort of piece by piece, okay, like what is the reality of that agreement? Or, like, the big three auto agreements and things like that. Like

Nancy Jowske (04:20)
Mm-hmm.

Phillip Wilson (04:20)
what’s the reality of that agreement versus the, you know, the Teamsters or UAW press release about that agreement? And they’re usually vastly different.

Nancy Jowske (04:29)
I feel like I kind of saw the cadence with both: I’m not I don’t want to say it was me; I wanna say it was you. Okay, where everybody was talking about how great and scary that UPS contract was until they weren’t. You know, and it was just like one day ever since, you know, a couple of people started to pick up on the fact that it wasn’t so great, and you started hearing that more and more. But certainly the initial well, people don’t look at the contract, right? They w which is another important thing about what I do is getting past getting around the the wall of union.

Phillip Wilson (05:00)
Yeah. I mean, you know from your time as a campaign consultant, when you’re communicating to people, like it’s well, and probably you did it when you were organizing, right? It’s like, you’re only gonna talk about the great things that are in the labor agreement or you’re gonna do the it’s a twenty percent increase, but like you never hear what else is in there, what was on the table before that agreement was reached, like all the other stuff, right?

Nancy Jowske (05:29)
What I think is funny about that is I remember back from my union days when you talk to business agents or what you know, nego during negotiations, where you’d see them get themselves all in a twist, right? About an adverb, right? Or, you know, is it is or was, is it this or that, you know? And so you’re gonna tell me that you sat down with these people for like three, six months or whatever, and just everything came up sunshine for you. All right, and you didn’t change.

Phillip Wilson (05:55)
No.

Nancy Jowske (05:57)
any of that language, and it’s a perfect example in the UPS contracts full of it.

Phillip Wilson (06:01)
Yeah. Well, so what, like what starts one of these projects? Like, what are the kind of things that sort of you’re first asked about when, you know, like, what are the things that kind of trigger someone to ask you, or ask us to do a custom research project?

Nancy Jowske (06:18)
Well, you know, I don’t generally know the why because I’m not talking to the client directly most of the time. Sometimes the client wants to set up a call, and I was certainly open to that, you know, either to go over what I find or to get some grounding before I go looking. And that doesn’t happen often. Most of the time they talk to somebody there.
And you guys come to me and say, Can you do a deep dive on this and that? And when can you have it done? And then I do. And I’m assuming most often it feels like what we’re now seeing a lot of is I’m opening up a new site, or my company’s opening up a new site, in a place that scares me. And so tell me everything that you can about Minneapolis: is it worth our trouble to go from here to there, that kind of thing, in terms of labor relations, which I know is just one piece of that puzzle. I would assume they get a petition or they’ve got some kind of inactivity, but you guys would know more than I would why they’re coming asking for reports.

Phillip Wilson (07:16)
And I mean, you just named a few reasons, obviously, if there’s activity, whether that’s organizing like a petition or just pre-petition, or there are petitions that are happening, you know, around a location. You know, a lot of people get excited if there’s this type of activity. Then there’s a number of these sort of campaigns, like in South Carolina right now, there’s like these roving campaigns or pickets anyway. So like there’s that kind of thing that would generate it. So there’s activity that is making me interested. Then there is we’re considering opening in several different locations and we want to know what the labor environment looks like, sort of comparing

Nancy Jowske (08:01)
Comparatively.

Phillip Wilson (08:02)
different locations to each other. That’s a common ask, somewhat common. and and then sometimes it’s just I wanna be proactive about there being either a particular union or, like you say, particular regions or things like that that are always of interest to me and I want to know what’s the latest that’s happening there. Those are real common. Or I’ve got a contract that’s coming up and I need research for that.

Nancy Jowske (08:26)
Seems like kind of it for a lot of companies, like good hygiene, right? Like we know we’re always going to have issues. I’m thinking of a few companies; we know we’re always gonna get trouble from the Teamsters here. So tell me about
this Teamster local and leadership. And then we also will do an update. So if you get a deep dive, you get a much reduced cost for another look at it a year later and a year after that if you kept that going.

Phillip Wilson (08:49)
Right. So I think that’s sort of what triggers it. And then now talk a little bit about your process, you know, you don’t have to give away all your secrets, but like what, but yeah, what are the kinds of things that you do? So you get a new project, maybe walk us through a little bit about, like, what are the kinds of things that you are looking for, what sort of sources do you look for, just things like that.

Nancy Jowske (08:59)
So I started doing this maybe, it seems like it’s probably getting like 10 years ago, where it always starts with the data. I have a workbook sort of template that’s mostly set up for unions, but it’s also for regions and industries; I can make it work. Where I just want to put it all there because I was wasting so much time looking for stuff I already had. So, in the process of doing that, I’ve got some things built into that workbook so I can see things right away. I can take that OLMS data and I can just put it right there into that spreadsheet, and it’s gonna generate all kinds of great stuff for me. And actually that’s one of the things that Claude, I discovered, can do a wonderful job for me of reading those LM-2s back in history and giving me all kinds of data that I would have killed me to try to get to before. So I’d

Phillip Wilson (10:00)
Mm-hmm.

Nancy Jowske (10:01)
always start with the data; that’s my hand-to-bible thing, and then it kind of depends on whether maps make sense; that’s probably another thing I’m looking at, like where is this stuff in relation? If you’re asking me about a region, I gotta understand it, right? And so much I, you know, one thing I always meant to share with you is, you know, these reports come up, and they look pretty dense. They’re a tough read, okay, in the sense that they’re there’s a lot there, all right. A lot of that information is me grounding myself. In other words, I’m also telling the client probably a lot of stuff they already know, but I need to understand. In order to do the research, in order to step
forward into the problem, you know. So I need to understand the industry if that’s what it is. There are some, obviously, some things I already know inside and out, like last mile. All right.

Phillip Wilson (10:51)
Mm-hmm.

Nancy Jowske (10:52)
I don’t need to understand that, but people will come in, companies will come in with, you know, tell us about pharmacists, tell us about pharmacists. Robotic text tells me, so I have to ramp up on that before I can even start looking for what I’m looking for. Generally speaking, it’s already popping up in the data, though. And you know, I already know where I want to keep looking.

Phillip Wilson (11:13)
Mhm. Yeah. I think like we’ll focus on the data just for a second, then we’ll kinda

Nancy Jowske (11:18)
Okay.

Phillip Wilson (11:18)
talk about sort of what happens after that. But I mean, and of course, you are, I mean, for sure like the top user of LRI right now. Like, there are law firms that use it a lot, and you definitely lap them multiple times a year. So you’re deep into the data, whether that’s the LM data, the elections and contracts and all the stuff that’s housed there in LRI right now. And then you know, you know more than anyone, like a lot of the data that you get from the government is just not great, right? So you have to do all kinds of massaging of that data. Maybe, talk a little bit. Contracts are the one that leaps to mind, but maybe talk a little bit about somebody that’s trying to recreate what you do. It would be really easy to just dump a list of contracts and go, like, there are this many contracts. Tell us a little bit about some of the things that you have to do, like, know, to sort of get the data correct before you can even start really doing the rest of the research that you do.

Nancy Jowske (12:30)
So you’re right, in that contracts are the biggest nightmare for me. Because I don’t feel like I can just use, like, say, a three-year cutoff date for an expiration date because I know things don’t get reported. I would like to know if a place just shut down, went out of business, or whatever. So I go back like five years, and what that means is you get duplicates. And sometimes, like, I’m kidding, I’m getting pains. Sometimes the union will submit the contract to the employees.

Submits, then the union realizes it submitted it wrong, puts it back again. So there could be, you know, five, six entries for the same contract. Maybe most of them with different expiration dates. And then it’s just my thing. I like to treat differently those units that are really small, you know, that are like 10 or sometimes those are just hanging on to another contract anyway. But then if I need to map them, then there’s dealing with the addresses, which is a whole other thing.

Phillip Wilson (13:25)
Yeah.

Nancy Jowske (13:26)
yeah. But when you’re generating data, I think you can, and I’ve seen it where, when you’re looking at the RCs from the NLRB, we went through a period there. I can’t remember what it was; it might have been electronic filing or something there, where unions- there was apparently a learning curve, all right, about how to fill in this new petition. So there were a massive number of duplicate petitions because they put it in, then came back, and then put it in again. And I also removed the ones where we put it in, we got the list, we withdrew, and then we came back a week later. I count that as one petition because I think that screws with your figures if you consider that two events. So I’m trying to turn those petitions into events, if that makes sense, rather than letting just the sheer number of items determine how much activity there is. Things like that.

Phillip Wilson (14:16)
Yeah. I think it’s interesting in context, so depending on the client situation, there are times where, you know, just the dump of the data, even though it’s imperfect, is probably good enough for this one purpose. Whereas if it’s one of these deep-dive situations where you really want to know truth, like as much accuracy as possible. Then there’s this whole other layer of detail, and I just mean time and just digging and digging and digging thatvyou have to do to really make sure that raw data real.

Nancy Jowske (14:52)
I also put a lot in when I give it to the client, so the client gets this workbook; if they do a deep dive, where I’ve also done things like put the right acronyms in for the unions.

Phillip Wilson (15:02)
Mm-hmm.

Nancy Jowske (15:03)
It cleaned up the union names because they won’t sort right, depending on what these folks decide to call themselves today. So I’ll go in and put an acronym in. I do the it started out as things that make my life easier and hopefully it makes it easier for the client as well when they get the data.

Phillip Wilson (15:17)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Great. So okay, you get the data and you’ve got kind of like, all right, now I know where I’m gonna start shining the flashlight. What kind
of steps do you go through after that?

Nancy Jowske (15:29)
Well, I look at what’s available in their social media. And it looks like I’m an old lady, so I’m addicted to Facebook, but that’s not it. Facebook is the easiest to search. And so far, very few union locals don’t have a Facebook page, you know. And if they don’t keep it active or up to date, they don’t keep anything up to date has been my experience,

Phillip Wilson (15:50)
Mm-hmm.

Nancy Jowske (15:51)
So it’s easier to search on Facebook. That’s why I’m always using that. And then, of course, I look at their actual webpage, and that can tell you a lot. You know, like how often it’s updated, you know, and that kind of thing. kind of put my eyeballs on the leadership, and then I just do a broad search just to see what comes up. But a lot of times I tell I’m already into the data for something. I’m trying to track down something specific in the data, like okay, what why did they owe the federal government $1.8 million last year? This just happened. $1.8 million dollars last year, and look, this guy just got trusteed. What happened? And it’s a bad PPP loan, right? Or is that it? PPP. So things like that’ll pop and I’ll kind of go off in that direction, right? Then if it’s an event, obviously I’m looking for anything I can find on the event. All right. So anybody that might be connected to it. And so it’s that kind of open-source stuff, kind of what I’m finding. I spend a lot of time at the NLRB, not literally, but I spend a lot of time over there on the database trying to get it to work because that’s a horrible, horrible thing to have to search.

And the Department of Labor depends what I’m looking for, what’s going on, what kind of report it is. I go into it feeling like I’m not gonna be satisfied until I find something good. All right. Even if the something good isn’t there, there’s nothing wrong with this local; don’t attack them on those grounds. All right. They’re great, all right. They’re finances are great. Everything’s great. You know,don’t start talking about the things that are kind of the easy go-tos, you know, how they spend the money or how much they make, that kind of thing.

Phillip Wilson (17:33)
Yeah, I think that’s a really great point, that you know, it’s so easy to just sort of gloss through an LM and you have the amount contributed on behalf of members and you know there’s like these easy-button things that are very commonly used to say look at how much money this union spends. If you get to the level of research that you’re doing, there for sure are lots of unions that have lots of crazy stuff on their LMs, but you also often find this union is run really well, like financially. Like don’t attack them on their financials because they do a good job.

Nancy Jowske (18:19)
Yes. They’re gonna take you apart with that. You know, they’re gonna take it from you and start hitting you with it. Okay, if you go after them over certain things, you know. That’s not to say that there aren’t crooked elections and wasting money. Come on. You know, that’s pretty standard, but occasionally you do come across one that looks pretty clean. So

Phillip Wilson (18:38)
Yeah. So, like, besides the usual suspects, what are some of the things that either you’ve found in the past or some of the things that you are surprised to find? Let’s start with Lm-2s. So besides the normal stuff, like what are the kinds of things that you go looking for in an LM-2?

Nancy Jowske (18:58)
Well, my current thing is I’m not interested in how much your total revenue was. I’m interested in what your dues or per-capita revenue was because that’s how you’re actually doing business. All right. So I’m not interested in how much you got from the government, how much you got from the parent union, how much you got for your rent or your investments. I wanna know how much you’re actually making off those members so then I can take that number and divide it by the number of members and find out what’s happening there. Right? Like, how much are other dues going up, even though the membership number is crazy? That’s another thing. I always want to look at the membership number because they’re playing games. Not all of them, but many of them are playing games around counting retirees as members you and I have talked about. This counts retirees as members. So it looks like they’re actually growing, right? And they have the audacity. this is the teachers’ union. We’ll talk about how they’re growing, and they’re growing because they started counting retirees. All right,

Phillip Wilson (19:53)
Yeah.

Nancy Jowske (19:53)
But there are others. The post office union is doing it. I mean, there are other unions that are doing that. So It’s really more my workbook tells me the things i need like how many members they’ve been losing year to year, and there you go too. If you see some ab abnormality, like in 2019 or 2020. What happened in twenty twenty two, right? That they couldn’t balance their budget or whatever. And then they’rethere’s often some that’s where this one point eight million dollar thing was at. so I don’t know if I answered the question.

Phillip Wilson (20:23)
Yeah. Yeah, you did. And then, also just looking at trends, right? So like, from year to year to year with like what’s changed and there will often be in some of those like schedules in the back. Like, wow, why did this law firm get paid like all of this money? It’s an unusually high amount this year, maybe compared to prior years and things like that, right? There are all kinds of things like that to find.

Nancy Jowske (20:51)
I always count or you know, if it’s organizing well, in most cases I’m gonna count organizer noses. And what’s interesting to me is when you’ll find they never have organizers and then all of a sudden they do, or they never have organizers but then all of a sudden they have a whole bunch of contracted organizers, which is more and more common. and so that’s actually gonna be down there in representational spending. It’s not gonna be up in the payroll.

Phillip Wilson (21:14)
Yeah.

Nancy Jowske (21:15)
so that kind of stuff is, I think, really important for the client to know as well.

Phillip Wilson (21:19)
So there’s been like, a whole revamp of, or, like, a proposed revamp of the LM-2 formto try to really sort of expand what data gets reported in them. As someone who probably spends more time in LM2s than anyone on Earth, what are some of the things that you believe should change with the LM reporting form that you know or places where you find stuff gets hidden that, if it was required to sort of call that out, what would be a big deal? What advice would you give to improve the LM forms?

Nancy Jowske (21:54)
Well, I know that they’ve recently changed and I apologize that I didn’t I I don’t recall what what changed. I know one thing that I really wanted to see change was active members versus everybody else. All right. That you can’t start counting volunteers and you know, affiliate members and stuff. The members deserve to know how many members, number one. right.

Phillip Wilson (22:13)
Right, that are actually footing the bill, right?

Nancy Jowske (22:15)
I think that they this is a pet peeve of mine. I think when they have a legal settlement, they should have to disclose that and they should have to disclose the term, you know, the nature of it, maybe not the details of it or something. I don’t know legally,

Nancy Jowske (22:30)
but it just bothers the hell out of me when I see what is clearly a settlement. I want to know: was it an employee, was it a member? What is that about? And I think the members have a right to know that, like if you think in terms of an annual statement from a corporation, what do those investors deserve to know. i think the members are owed that. This is dues money they’re giving into this institution supposedly to support them going forward, and i think they have a right to know everything. You know, the book should be wide open

Phillip Wilson (23:01)
Yeah.

Nancy Jowske (23:02)
I can’t think off the top of my head; those were the two. I think they did clean this one up. Representational spending needs to just be arbitration, bargaining, and the costs of any costs of the business agents. That’s it. Printing translations, you know. None of this buttons and t-shirts and trips and crap.

Phillip Wilson (23:21)
Yeah, right. There’s a lot of stuff they will say is representational that isn’t really part of representing members, and that is definitely a pet peeve of mine too. It’s just that the number is very inflated. And there’s not a lot of detail given in sort of this is the stuff that qualifies and doesn’t qualify in those different buckets, right? That just that would help.

Nancy Jowske (23:45)
Yes, absolutely. Well, you know, right off the bat they shouldn’t be putting new or cost of new organizing, which in most unions way outweighs the cost of representation.

Phillip Wilson (23:55)
Mm-hmm.

Nancy Jowske (23:56)
but they pass it off. I know from my union days, they, you know, they pass it off as, you know, the only way we grow, the only way we represent you is by getting new members. Not really. Yeah. I mean take more care of the members you have first, okay.

Phillip Wilson (24:07)
Yeah.

Nancy Jowske (24:08)
And then if you got anything left over, you know, but that’s not how it’s done. So

Phillip Wilson (24:13)
Yeah, true. Yeah, the organizing number is the one that they pump that by adding retirees and all this otherstuff. but that’s where the money, you know, really gets spent and invested. But besides, you know, boondoggles.

Nancy Jowske (24:30)
Yes.

Phillip Wilson (24:32)
So what are some of, like, the craziest stuff or things that you’ve found over the years? Digging through these reports.

Nancy Jowske (24:38)
So I knew this question was coming and one of the problems is that it’s very hard to talk about some of the stuff because it would reveal who asked for it; you can’t not reveal the client when you’re telling the story. I mean, that’s kind of the punchline half the time.

Phillip Wilson (24:52)
Mm-hmm.

Nancy Jowske (24:53)
there’s a lot of that, but th but also it’s not you know, it’s not that exciting. All right. The smoking gun or whatever is often the organizer, actually is this person who says This is actually that, but it’s not particularly compelling. It’s just that they have a union background or something.

Phillip Wilson (25:07)
Mm-hmm.

Nancy Jowske (25:08)
One of my favorites, I guess, is relatively recent. You mentioned North Carolina, there is a campaign going it’s like a social justice-y kind of thing, but they’re also going after organizing employers down there. And a guy who was leading the effort in his workplace, the leader of it as an employee, was in fact a professor at the local college, and he had deliberately taken the job in order to support those efforts. Here’s what he did. He got a grant for the National Science Foundation.

Grant for $200,000 on organizing unions in the 21st century. He created two courses. He also had a bunch of graduate students and interns that he coached to either work with the union or get jobs at his work site. And all the time he’s just, well, doing research, and he had quit by the time I was working on the report, but all the time he was still working there, he was just, you know, a country boy who taught at the local college who was just interested in making extra money. I hate that stuff all right so
That’s a favorite.

I think I’m maybe too geeky about this stuff. To me, the geekiest stuff or the most interesting stuff, is things like how the pay disparity between union and non-union in manufacturing Yeah.

Nancy Jowske (26:32)
and where it is in retail and warehouse. There’s like a five-dollar gap in the way you wouldn’t expect. Okay, in the fact that non-union people are and and my theory on it is it’s just how they’re weighted, especially during inflation, their wages were being suppressed. While everybody else was going through labor shortages, give me more money.

Phillip Wilson (26:53)
Yeah.

Nancy Jowske (26:54)
Yep. And holding on to folks and those union wages were suppressed. They don’t talk about that. Obviously they don’t talk about that,

Phillip Wilson (27:01)
Right.

Nancy Jowske (27:02)
but
That’s the whole thing about the UPS contract and the Big Three contract. It barely got some people up to the rate of inflation with their agreements. If you just calculated their wages based on inflation, and that includes cola and everything else. So they weren’t the big deals the unions claimed.

Phillip Wilson (27:17)
Right.

Nancy Jowske (27:18)
And that’s the kind of thing I enjoy. Like when I can pin them to the wall on something, you know.

Phillip Wilson (27:22)
Yeah. And that doesn’t include the people that got laid off so there’s all of that. And then the BLS numbers like don’t get me started, but they also don’t control for the fact that the largest population of people are in New York, California, and Illinois.

Nancy Jowske (27:39)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Phillip Wilson (27:41)
And so you’re like you’re not comparing apples to apples. so there’s that that whole problem. It’s just, yeah, those numbers are flawed. But even in spite of all of that that helps the union number, they’re still behind in some industries, right? Yeah.

Nancy Jowske (27:53)
Mm-hmm. It’s yeah, it’s that low. Yeah.

Phillip Wilson (27:58)
Well I think I wanna sort of land the plane here. We’re getting close to our time. But talk a little bit about just sort of the power of having this knowledge. You don’t just do a research project just for fun, right? So like why is it important for employers and people that are, like, making decisions around, where to put a plant or what to say or do during a campaign? Why is it important for them to have this kind of depth of information?

Nancy Jowske (28:34)
I think that’s different depending, you know, on where you want to put a plant, and I have found this, all right. Think of twice about putting it right across the street from a UPS barn or a factory with a thousand union members in it. Just think about it. Just know, all right, or know that there is a union office on the next block. That certainly comes out of the research, as far as what do you want to know? Like, to me, let’s say you have an incident in your facility; you don’t want to just assume that whoever says they’re out there is who’s out.

If it really is just employee-driven, that is very different than if there is another force behind it. Same thing with community groups. If it’s a genuine community group of your neighbors that are there, they want to talk about something; that’s very different from their being put up to that, right? And we see so many of these pickets and stuff like that where the Teamsters are infamous for it. They’re picketing something, and they’re going, all these picketers.

They list 20 different locals. And then there’s like two employees in employee shirts and, you know, 50 Teamsters. And I suppose I guess that’s supposed to persuade me, if I’m an employee, that, you know, I want to join these guys. So I would want to know: if I try to stand in the employer’s shoes, what do I want to know in this circumstance? So if I’m bargaining, or getting ready to bargain, or already have a relationship with them, I want to know what’s going on with other employers as best I can.

I want to see those other contracts. I want to know how that’s going. If it’s a campaign, I think I want to know how they have behaved in other campaigns. You know, what can you expect them to do, and how can you expect them to behave? If it’s an event or an incident, I guess I want to know first of all who’s behind it and what their real intentions are. So much SEIU stuff. Settle down. It has nothing to do with them wanting to unionize you. There’s another nefarious plot in the background that you should be aware of, but it’s probably not what you think. All right? And

Phillip Wilson (30:35)
Mm-hmm.

Nancy Jowske (30:35)
And plus, they just- they’re, you know, I hate to sound this critical, but I guess I know I’m right about this. They are just a machine, a propaganda machine, right? That’s just pushing it, not just at you, but at employers as well. And you need to check on that if you’re just believing everything the union is telling you about your situation. Right, without somebody who understands it looking from the other side.

Phillip Wilson (30:57)
Yeah. And I guess this is where I really would like to end up is, like, you and I both care a ton about workers, right? Like, at the end of the day, those are the folks that matter, so, like, the LM-2, the whole point of having the LM is so that you can be informed about how your money is being spent. Maybe just talk a little bit about that.

Like, why is research like this, and sort of the things that are, you know, there’s the story, and then there’s the reason behind the story, and the propaganda machine and all of that. Like why is it important for working people to have access to information like this that’s accurate, that’s truthful, that’s comprehensive? Wy is that important?

Nancy Jowske (31:45)
Well, I guess I just go back to my time as a union organizer and on that side, and I was over there doing that work. For them, for the members. You know, I mean, I went to Catholic school; that’s what I was supposed to do, go out and change the world, whatever. All right. And so I was out there trying to help members, and I found out the hard way that’s not my job. And I also found out how much my job was them expecting me to lie to members and mislead members. And so that’s what I believe, based on my experience. Okay, is I wanna hold them accountable for the stuff they say they do, like that they speak for the members or that they’re democracies. All right. I wanna hold them to their own standards.

Phillip Wilson (32:29)
I think that’s a perfect place to end. Nancy, we could go on for hours.

Nancy Jowske (32:31)
Yeah.

Phillip Wilson (32:35)
I want to thank you so much for joining us.

Nancy Jowske (32:39)
Thank you.

Phillip Wilson (32:39)
We should do another episode where we just talk about, you know, your journey as an organizer. That’s an incredible story. People would love to hear that.